The Regional Department for the Communities, in partnership with Casa dos Açores in Lisbon, organized the first “Emigration Journeys/Communities” between January 10 and 12, 2002. Sixty people from various academic levels from the United States, Hawaii, Canada, Bermuda, Brazil, Portuguese mainland and the Azores attended this event.
Topics in discussion:
Citizenship and political involvement;
Cultural creation, incentives and ways of divulgation;
Individual and group education, what is the intellectuals’ responsibility in motivation?;
Cultural survival – acculturation or assimilation?;
The work of associations on behalf of the communities.
Objectives:
· Listen to a group of sixty intellectuals who, in a pragmatical way, transmitted their individual views about the communities and their own motivations in order to participate in the life of those same communities;
· Share the present concerns faced by the Portuguese residing mainly in the United States, Canada, Brazil and Bermuda;
· Talk about their hopes for the future, their interests and the problems lived in the communities,
· Adjust the politics of the Regional Government of the Azores to the intellectual needs of the communities;
· Join efforts to define and put into place the mutual work to be developed in the communities and in interaction with the Autonomous Region of the Azores.